Meet Homer Hickam Jr., the author of one of the most famous contemporary American memoirs, “Rocket Boys,” will be the featured speaker on Sunday, May 17 at 3:00 p.m. at the Abingdon Public Library as part of the “Sunday with Friends” literary series.

After education at Virginia Tech and service in Vietnam, Hickam was employed first as an engineer for the U.S. Army Missile Command in Huntsville, Alabama, and then as an aerospace engineer with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) where he worked in spacecraft design and crew training.

During his military and NASA career he found time to write histories, fiction, and memoirs. In “Rocket Boys,” Hickam looks back at his youth and formative years after a distinguished NASA career. He takes readers into the life of the little mining town of Coalwood, West Virginia, and the boys who would come to embody its dreams.

Step by step, with the help of a collection of unforgettable characters, the boys learn not only how to turn scrap into sophisticated rockets that fly miles into the sky, but how to sustain their dreams as they dared to imagine a life beyond its borders in a town that the postwar boom was passing by.

“Rocket Boys” was made into a very successful film, retitled “October Sky,” which starred Jake Gyllenhaal (as Homer), Chris Cooper, and Laura Dern.
Hickam has written four other books about Coalwood, a series of novels about a Coast Guard officer during World War II, a series of young adult novels. and recently a thriller set in Montana, “The Dinosaur Hunter.”